Now Amazon is going after Microsoft and IBM with new service

AWS senior vice president Andy Jassy. AWS Amazon just launched a new business intelligence service called QuickSight, a data-analytics platform that will let users quickly visualize and share their data stored in Amazon Web Services.

The new service is available in preview starting Wednesday.

QuickSight, powered by Amazon's new technology called "super-fast parallel in-memory computation engine (SPICE)," makes it easy for nontechnical users to create charts and graphs based on data stored in AWS' various services.

Andy Jassy, senior vice president at AWS, said it could take as little as 60 seconds to visualize data and would cost one-10th of what it would on competing products. Users can share and collaborate around the data and charts and easily embed the charts into third-party apps or websites, too.

With QuickSight, AWS is venturing into a competitive market dominated by old guards like IBM (Cognos) and Microsoft (Power BI/Excel), as well as new entrants such as Tableau. Even software companies like Salesforce and Workday have been releasing new data-analytics platforms, reflecting the growing demand in this space.

But AWS has the largest market share in the cloud-computing market, and it has lately been signing up not just early startups but also large businesses including GE, Boeing, and Netflix, making it a huge threat to existing vendors.

Jassy added that AWS was on pace to hit $7.3 billion in annual revenue run rate this year, growing 81% year-over-year. AWS is also profitable, as it reported $391 million in operating profit last quarter on $1.8 billion net sales.